Pro-Folio Generates Personalized (Fake) Artist Portfolios

Pro-Folio, an Internet page coded by Sures Kumar, as part of a project at the Royal Academy of Art and Design Interactions called Scientific Hoax, creates totally fabricated artist’s portfolios with nothing more than the click of a button. Above is the making-of video, an immense undertaking. Kumar’s code sweeps the bowels of the open web to come up with images, colleges, and more, making you look like a pedigreed painter with the click of a button. He posits the site can create 690,903,803 trillion unique identities.

It seems the intention of the website is to manufacture human identities through computer code, giving the notion that the self is nothing more than an amalgam of random events, locations, pictures, and phrases. If that’s not terrifying enough for you, here’s how Kumar describes the piece, in part:

Pro-Folio questions the nominal authenticity of works, which constructs artist’s and designers online identity (i.e. Name, Education, Work, etc). As an outcome, a website www.pro-folio.org was built which creates fictional identities of artists and designers. The algorithm also adds random work as their bona-fide portfolio. This happens dynamically (in real-time) when the user is browsing the portfolio.

While this is fun to tool around with—you should see how our portfolios look sprinkled with random high honors!—it seems like only a matter of time before some art student gets caught using this to apply to college. Fingers crossed! We love a good hoax.